Rebekah Mitsein

1. How did you become interested in eighteenth-century studies in particular?
Despite the fact that my favorite movie when I was a kid was an animated adaptation of Gulliver’s Travels, I had no idea that I would end up in the eighteenth century when I started graduate school. I thought I was going to study postmodern theory. But enough postmodern thinkers used the Enlightenment as a jumping-off point that I thought I’d better take a look at it, and I got stuck here. It turned out that writers in the eighteenth century were asking the same questions I was: What justifies calling something “knowledge?” How do discrete experiences or observations get abstracted into universal claims? What role does imaginative writing play in producing truth? But their responses didn't fit into the tidy narratives I had always been told about the era. So, I became interested in a new question: What can we learn from the awkward bits, historical or literary, that don’t fit into our intellectual and cultural mythologies?  
2. What are you working on right now?
My current book project looks at how African self-representation influenced early eighteenth-century British literature and shaped Enlightenment impressions of the world. Travel writers and authors of imaginative works used Africa as a kind of testing ground for burgeoning scientific and philosophical ideas. But in the process, they integrated African knowledge, narratives, and culture into their texts. I hope shining light on this will help us continue to re-envision the eighteenth-century as less as the brainchild of European Cartesian subjects and more as an era that was globally produced. 
3. How do you approach or incorporate gender or women's studies in your work? 
One of my goals is to bring more attention to the fact that eighteenth-century travelers and writers had interpersonal, economic, and political connections with African women, and that these women played a crucial role in shaping how they made sense the world. For example, the West Africans that Europeans and Arabs traded with were as likely to be women as men, and women were often European travelers’ most powerful cultural brokers in Africa. A chapter of my current project maps out how the historical women of the Solomonic Dynasty and the exceptional women of the Ethiopian literary tradition (like the Queen ofSheba) dictated the terms that Europeans used to represent East Africa. 
4. What is one book or article that you are reading now that gets your creative and/or analytic side going? Why? (eighteenth-century studies, scholarship, anything)
Wendy Laura Belcher and Michael Kleiner’s translation of Galawdewos’s The Life and Struggles of  Our Mother Walatta Petros  (Princeton UP, 2015). It’s a seventeenth-century biography of a woman who left her husband to become a nun and help lead Ethiopia’s resistance against Jesuit conversion. It blows the truisms we stereotypically use to historicize both African women and African literature out of the water.
5. What more can we do to support women in academia? In ASECS?
I still see a lot of women internalizing the ideas that in order to fit into academia we need to be hyper-vigilant about the way we talk, the way we dress, the way we look, the way we engage with the world, and that anything less than perfection will constitute a one-way trip to failure. I’m so grateful that the women who have mentored me have taken an active stand against that message. But I think slaying that dragon is going to be a multi-generational task.  

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